Guitar Triads – Understanding Them and Using Them Effectively

Often when it comes to learning guitar, there comes a point where we get stuck between being able to play and know chord shapes and actually understanding what they’re made up of, enter guitar triads.

Guitar triads are the 3 (that’s the ‘tri’ of triad) notes that make up a chord.  These common three note chords are known as a triad.  When we actually play most chords on a guitar we are adding additional notes in beyond just playing 3 unique tones.  This is due to the fact that the guitar has 6 strings and to get the most resonance out of it, we add on more notes.

Once you begin to understand each chords triad, then it becomes a matter of you choosing to add or subtract whatever notes you want to create the sound you hear in your head.  So, what is the triad?

As I mentioned above, it’s 3 notes and beyond that, we have to jump down the rabbit hole of music theory a bit.  If we want to understand chords, we have to go to the basic level of the notes.  So let’s go!

In Western Music, we have 12 notes, known as the Chromatic Scale.  If you take any open string on your guitar, play it, and then successively play each fretted note down to the 12th fret, you would have played 12 notes and repeated where you started at 13 notes on the 12th fret.  This would be traveling one Octave (that’s the same note value, just higher pitch frequency).

It’s good to note that on guitar we get 4 octaves at the max.  So for example, a ‘C’ note on the 5th string at the 3rd fret is our lowest ‘C’ note, a ‘C’ note on the 3rd string at the 5th fret would be the 2nd octave, a 3rd octave of ‘C’ could be played on the 2nd string at the 13th fret, and lastly, the 4th octave could be played on the 1st string at the 20th fret.

Although there are other instances of ‘C’ on your fretboard, those are 4 unique octave spots, and the other ‘C’ notes would be duplicates or ‘unisons’ of those 4 ‘C’ notes.

So back to understanding a triad.  Triads have a root note, or 1st degree, a 3rd, and a 5th tone to them.  The reason that these tones are called 1, 3, and 5 is because that represents the number order of their parent scale.  Just as the Chromatic Scale covers every note we have, there are other scales that take a series of notes out of that Chromatic Scale to form their own scales.  The most common of these are the Major Scale and Natural Minor Scale.  You’ve probably heard the Major Scale a zillion times…Do-Rae-Mi-Fa-So-La-Ti-Do, with Do being the root note repeating, one octave higher.

So what that means is that we took 7 notes out of the 12 to form the Major Scale.  How we did that is by choosing a root note, or starting point, then following a series of steps.  Let’s take a look.

In this example, we chose to start from the ‘A’ note, but we could start anywhere.  Doing so from ‘C’ would yield, C-D-E-F-G-A-B and repeating at C, one octave higher.  Not too hard right?

So now that we have a scale that is Diatonic and will be in key when we start building chords off each tone, what do we do?  Well, we can start with ‘C’.  Remember above I said that a triad has a 1 (or root), 3rd and 5th.  So if ‘C’ is our 1, counting down, ‘E’ would be the 3rd, and ‘G’ would be the 5th.  We would therefore have formed a ‘C’ Triad or ‘C’ Chord.  Now because the scale above is the C Major Scale, this triad is a C Major Chord.  By continuing this same pattern for each of our scale degrees of C Major, we would build 7 triads or chords.  Let’s take a look.

By harmonizing the rest of the C Major scale, we get 3 Major Chords or Triads, 3 minor Chords or Triads, and 1 ugly duckling that is minor, but has a flattened 5th in relation to its Major Scale (that would be the B Major Scale).  If you were to go ahead and spell out each of C’s scale degrees as their own Major Scale, you would see how those harmonized triads differ from C Major’s triads.  This alone is a powerful way to see and learn to spell triads, build scales and understand their relation to each other.

So if we spelled the D Major Scale, E Major Scale, F Major Scale, G Major Scale, A Major Scale, and finally the B Major Scale, we would see that the D Major triad is different from our D triad in the C Major Scale by one note.  The 3rd is a half step higher in D Major.  This tells us that the difference between a Major Triad and a minor Triad is a flattened 3rd.  Both the 1 (root), and 5th remain the same.  The only other type of chord, as we said above, is the 7th scale degree.  Everytime it is harmonized, it will differ from its Major chord version by a flattened 3rd and a flattened 5th.

Now let’s look at a popular open chord and see what else is added to the triad…

By looking at the chord diagram above, you can see that we start with the 1 (C), then have E (our 3rd), and G is played as an open string, which is our 5th.  So right there we have a triad, but you can see we’re playing additional notes.  These notes are part of the triad, but note that the next ‘C’ is a different octave, which adds fullness to the chord and re-enforces, C as the root.  We also repeat the 3rd, which again is a different octave, higher up.  So instead of just playing a triad, we’re playing 1-3-5 and 1-3 higher up, which could be continued as 8, 10 if we didn’t start our numbering over at 7.

Adding these additional notes to chords is what fills them out and changes their character.  Another key part of this would be that of re-arranging the order of the triad.  What if I put the 3 (E) as the lowest note?  Then I’d have 3-5-1.  This would be a first inversion.  That’s really for another lesson.  But just know that you can stack triads around on guitar however you like to get just the right sound you’re going for.

Hopefully this lesson has been helpful and given greater clarity into what a guitar triad is.  You can always get more free lessons and keep up with what we’re doing here by subscribing over on the right…And of course, any questions or comments, please leave them below and I’ll answer them as soon as I can.

To your success!

-Andrew